RubyCocoa is a great framework if you want to create Mac applications with the special flavor. It provides you with everything you need to interact with the Mac OS X system. RSpactor, e.g., is using RubyCocoa’s FSEvent interface to listen to your file system. This article is a description of how to build RubyCocoa from source on your Mac.

Getting, building, using

At first you need to download the latest source tarball from here. After the download has finished simply unzip and chdir in the newly extracted directory.

tar zxf RubyCocoa-0.13.2.tgz
cd RubyCocoa-0.13.2

Now we have a local copy of the RubyCocoa source. Its time for building and installation.

ruby install.rb config --build-universal=no
ruby install.rb setup
sudo ruby install.rb install

At this point RubyCocoa is already available on your system. Lets fire up irb to make sure that your new RubyCocoa installation is working properly.

irb
require "osx/foundation" 

At this point you should see a nice “true”. If you have any problems comment here or have a look at http://rubycocoa.sourceforge.net/GettingStarted.